


Here in the Dark

by Anefi



Series: Anefi's Transformers Works [7]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Doctor/Patient, Falling In Love, First Meetings, Other, Pre-Slash, Pre-War, Ratchet's clinic in the Dead End, minor Ratchet & Orion Pax, minor Ratchet & Pharma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:14:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24722140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: Once in a while, when he was coming out of recharge, Drift thought he could remember what it felt like to be just a spark, a little warm ball of nothing, suspended in an infinite moment without expectations or sensors or regrets.The rest of his life isn't all bad. On a race track, some laps are smoother than others. Some laps, you crash.He meets Ratchet.
Relationships: Drift | Deadlock/Ratchet
Series: Anefi's Transformers Works [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918825
Comments: 40
Kudos: 131





	1. I have a thought that consoles me

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for attempted suicide, hurt robots, and Golden Age inequality.

The Afterspark wasn’t everything Drift had hoped it would be.

The direct shot hadn’t been what he expected either, the acrid, buzzing, overwhelming heat, but when all his senses had started smearing together like coolant in the rain, at least he’d known it was the last time he’d ever be surprised.

Then he woke up. Like most surprises, it hurt. 

Once in a while, when he was coming out of recharge, Drift thought he could remember what it felt like to be just a spark, a little warm ball of nothing, suspended in an infinite moment without expectations or sensors or regrets. That would have been pretty much the opposite of what he got instead: searing, seeping pain, like acid under his cranial plating, just enough variation in the feedback to differentiate one awful moment from the next.

His visual feed was shorted to burning white, but a hum of some kind scraped on the edge of hearing. A voice.

“—stable. It’s good you’re here, anyway,” it said. “—anted to talk—” It was rough, a little more grating than he felt was right for Primus. Not that he’d really thought about what Primus should sound like. At least they were happy to see him.

Before he could figure out how to reply, everything slipped away again.

He floated in a state somewhere below consciousness, like the deadened heaviness that came with waking up in a relinquishment clinic. The next time he surfaced, his spark was integrated enough with the frame that he could start to feel the damage. Everywhere. Either all the nervous circuits had burned out, or he’d been beaten to within an inch of his life—or both. With the next attempt to access an optical feed, bright static stabbed at his aching mind, harsher than sunlight after vorns underground.

Primus, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the sun.

A voice came out of the light. _The_ voice. Drift was having trouble making out the words; his audio receptors weren’t quite online, or maybe the processor behind them. It sounded worried. “—Just not sure he’s really your friend, Orion.”

Orion?

“He doesn’t need to be my friend. He is the Prime,” a deep voice replied.

Ah.

The voice—they weren’t talking to him.

He let the insistent tug toward nothing pull him under again, for a while, and imagined being one in a field of sparks, glittering under a mirror sky of stars.

His optics flickered on to a dingy ceiling in dim light. An effort to access recent memory files brought him corruption errors and a sharp slice of pain to the cortex, and something started beeping beside him—an alarm. When he tried to turn his head to see it, he found he couldn’t. The alarm beeped faster.

It was cut off with a sharp slap. A face swam into focus above him; nobody he recognized. “Hey, hey, calm down. You’re going to be fine,” the stranger said. Red and white colors, tired eyes. “You’re in a medical clinic. Sedation’s wearing off. After that stunt you pulled last orn, you’re lucky to be anywhere.”

With great effort, Drift dragged his vocalizer online. “Hi,” he croaked.

The weary face softened into a slight smile. “Hey, kid,” he said. “Glad you made it.”

So, that was how he met Ratchet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! This will probably be a few k, all pre-war, can be read as either canon compliant or AU. I've got another bit on Drift joining the Decepticons that can fit into this [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23979106/chapters/58530571).


	2. light is a moment

He staggered back out onto the street after one more recharge cycle, when he woke up and the doctor wasn’t there. The medical-grade energon had Drift processing with more clarity than he had for a while—or maybe it was the complete replacement of his neural net—and he didn’t want to be hanging around waiting for Ratchet to get back, like he was looking for—anything else. He was fixed, right? They were done. He wasn’t sure what Ratchet was getting out of giving away stuff like that for free. Practice, maybe. It’s not like the cops would come for him if he messed anybody up, down here. Especially since—he said that a cop dragged Drift’s sorry aft to the clinic in the first place, some friend of his. With that kind of protection, Ratchet could probably sell half his patients as spare parts and get away with it.

His fuel tanks were still adjusting, so that may have been the only reason, but the rich fuel didn’t sit right as his cynicism started to spin out the worst kinds of speculation. There were shiny hacks by the race tracks or downtown who would try to sell you upgrades or mods or whatever, and they were always smiling, eager to be your friend, help you out, and—he’d heard stories. He’d seen some of the slag that went wrong when they were done. It didn’t seem like Ratchet was anything like them.

Still. No reason to take the chance.

So he never meant to go back. Sometimes things happened, that was all, and you got to stand up and walk away from a wreck when you didn’t think you would. Drift watched out for himself, and kept to himself, and patched himself up when he got jumped for the fuel in his lines or picked up a rust infection in his foot while crawling through scrap for salvage. The first hit of boosters with the new neural net wasn’t great, but it kept him sharp through a three-orn job running deliveries, and within a few quartexes it was like he’d never been off them. He fell in with a mech called Hammerhead, for a bit, and it was nice to have a group to work with, to watch each other’s backs and pull off bigger scores, but then that went all the way bad. Wandering around the dilapidated tangle of underground alleys clutching his own torn-off arm kind of bad. He was going to need to find another crew.

Even blocks away from the warehouse, the empty streets were the stifled kind of quiet that had him walking softly and sticking to the shadows between sputtering streetlights, hand clamped over a major fuel line, trying not to leave a trail. Then he stepped through a hazy curtain of steam rising from a corroded vent, cleared the film of condensate from his optics, and realized where his feet had taken him.

It wasn’t that he’d forgotten about Ratchet, or where the clinic was. He knew. He just—hadn’t considered it an option. It probably wasn’t even open any more. The bot was crazy to run an operation like that this far from the surface. If nothing else, it had probably been robbed.

The door was locked when he found it, but it was set back from the alley enough for the stoop to be a little shelter, so. He huddled in, legs drawn up out of the way, arm in his lap, just to rest for a minute. Either someone would find him, and maybe it would be Ratchet, or—no harm done. There were worse places to spend a few joors.

It felt like he’d just stopped shivering when the door slid open and dumped him onto the ground. He cried out as his stump hit the floor, smearing fluids everywhere, and of course, his arm went flying. It skidded across the floor and fetched up against Ratchet’s ankles, slick pink fuel and black oil streaking his pristine white finish.

Drift winced as he looked up at the glowering medic. “Hey,” he said. Some ridiculous instinct incited him to wave a little with the hand still attached, and he winced again. Slowly, he reached out to take back his loose arm.

Ratchet grabbed it first. “This better be yours,” he said flatly. He spun on his heel to carry it into the clinic, leaving Drift to pick himself up and follow if he could.

He glanced back outside, past the spill of warm light to the dim, empty streets, but—where was he going to go? Ratchet had his arm. He let the door slide shut behind him.

For limb reattachments without a joint reconstruction Ratchet only had to shut down the local sensor net, evidently, so he let Drift stay awake while he patched the struts, soldered and sutured lines and cables. Drift didn’t have a good angle to see exactly what he was doing, so he watched Ratchet’s face as he worked, listened to his grumbling over the soft hum of the clinic’s old generator.

Eventually, Ratchet looked up, and scowled when he realized Drift was studying him. “What do you have to be smiling about? Have you seen the state of your coolant lines?” he demanded. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that rust infection in your leg, either.”

Drift started to shrug, until an impatient shove to the good part of his shoulder reminded him not to. He made a show about looking around the clinic. “I don’t know, I don’t see much to complain about here. Good fuel, good company—” he gestured with his free hand at the flat, bland medical-grade energon, and Ratchet’s frown.

“I’m still reattaching your arm,” Ratchet said. “You want to tell me again how it came to be _de_ -attached?”

Drift felt his optics flicker as he remembered the wrenching sound, and pain, and the other gang’s echoing laughter. He must have screamed, with how his vocalizer felt after, but the files were patchy. “Cargo loading accident,” he repeated stiltedly. He refocused on Ratchet’s face. “So,” he said, one corner of his mouth lifting, “Today’s going much better.”

Ratchet shook his head. “I see what the problem is. You’re an idiot,” he said. “Unfortunately, I can’t fix that.”

“I’m sure you’ll do your best,” Drift teased, the quirk of his mouth sneaking toward a real smile.

Ratchet coughed, suddenly, like there was something in his vents, and crossed the small room to rummage around in a cupboard. Drift’s smile grew sharp; before the medic turned away, Drift had caught him blushing.

A few other people came in while Drift sat on the slab in the corner for half a cycle, waiting for self-repair and the anti-corrosion drip to do their work. Ratchet tossed some reading material at him—stamped aluminum pamphlets on the safest way to swap active energon (filtered, return lines only; how quaint) and the dangers of boosting (many and varied—who knew?)—but Drift mostly watched.

There was a steady trickle of patients, on their own, brought in by friends, or in small groups. A construction worker hacking on ugly black soot, an older model with seizing joints, a discount newbuild with brittle struts. A trembling sykhead got set up on the middle berth, nobody Drift knew, the mismatched brightness of his optics blazing wildly. With only three stations in the single room, it got crowded quickly, and didn’t allow for much privacy. Polymesh sheets hung on rails that could wrap around each table to block the view, but Drift saw one guy pop his armor to the spark chamber without bothering to ask for the screen. Benches along the wall by the entrance were sized to accommodate a variety of frame types, if not comfortably, and the other three walls were packed with storage cupboards, cluttered countertops, and worn equipment.

At one point, there was a knock on the door—more of a pounding. Ratchet had been hunched over a messy desk in the corner of the room, flicking through a datapad, and he looked up at the sound, then over at Drift and the guy on the other slab, who was still out of it. The door didn’t open. “That’s never good,” Ratchet sighed, and picked up a hefty wrench from his desk on his way over to the door. Drift sat up and surreptitiously started to disconnect his intraline drip, so he wouldn’t rip it out if he had to move. A fuzzy external camera feed on a monitor popped out from the wall when Ratchet hit a button; it showed two mechs running away, the clank of their pedes loud on the suspiciously empty street. After a moment, a light in the corner of the feed went blue—some kind of scan completed. Ratchet tucked away the screen and stood to the side of the door as he opened it, waited a minute, then stepped out to the sheltered landing. The wrench clanged to the floor just inside. Drift stood to do—something, but Ratchet was back before he got more than a few steps, carrying a green mech half again his size by an arm over his shoulders. Ratchet waved him off before he had a chance to offer help. “Out of the way, kid.” He hauled the big mech onto the last berth, the compact strength of a forged medic’s frame more than up for the task.

The puddle of fluid where Drift had fallen through the door had been mopped up joors ago, but the mech’s dragging bulk left another long streak of weak pink energon across the floor. He was bleeding from a dozen ragged puncture wounds, but Drift could tell it wasn’t fuel loss that was causing the blank, empty look in the wandering optics, or the unnatural helpless jerking of his limbs. There was a serial number still smeared on the back of his head with greasy white paint.

“Damned syphoners,” Ratchet swore, as he heaved the mech’s last leg up onto the berth.

“They must have found him right outside the relinquishment clinic,” Drift said.

Ratchet looked at him sharply. He leaned over to check the new guy’s optics more closely, then turned his head and found the mark. “Hm,” he said. “Sit back down and plug back in. When he’s stabilized, I’ve got another pamphlet for you.”

It took a few cycles for a spark to settle back into a body, when it had been out for too long. The big green guy was clearly struggling; first time, maybe. Not that it was the kind of thing that got easier with experience. Or, it was, but that didn’t make the process any faster. With experience, you got used to it.

Drift was used to it.

“Careful, doc,” he said. “Someone who didn’t know you better might think that you actually care.”

“I don’t like seeing my hard work go to waste,” Ratchet shot back. “Now shut up and let me concentrate.”

So he sat and watched and read the stupid pamphlets. A few cycles later he heard from Hinge who heard from Clutch who heard from Bluster that Wipeout was looking for him with an offer, so he didn’t have to go get unframed again, either.


	3. new worlds are born

When it rained on the surface layers in Rodion, acid dripped and pooled and trickled and seeped along drains in the streets and cracks in the buildings, picking up scum and waste and minerals until by the time it started drizzling from the broken pipes and dangling wires over the sublevels of the Dead End, it was black as tar and sometimes ate through copper. As soon as he heard the first hissing drops and saw the rising wisps of caustic smoke, Drift ducked into a bar with a buzzing plasma sign. He had a little cash, and it was worth spending it to keep a table somewhere with a solid roof.

He wasn’t the only one with the same idea. The grumbling crowd carried him into a room slightly brighter inside than the perpetually dim streets, full of small tables jammed with sturdy chairs. He glanced around, subtly scoping out the exits and clientele. He recognized a few people from the local meetings; he lifted his chin in casual greeting, which they returned. To his surprise, he found a compact figure entrenched at a corner table, with a pointed red chevron on his bowed forehead. Drift self-consciously checked his own swept-back white helm tips for smudges—and hastily put his hand down as soon as he realized what he was doing. He deftly navigated his way over to the corner, dodging furniture and kibble, and snagged a stool from another table to claim the open spot like he knew he’d be welcome.

Ratchet looked up with a scowl, of course, but it faded to confusion when met with Drift’s most disarming smile. Drift leaned in over the unidentifiable stains and brace of empty glasses. “Of all the engex joints in all the world,” he said. “What’s a nice mech like you doing in a dump like this?”

The corners of Ratchet’s mouth twitched, but the expression that settled was more sad than anything else. “Cute,” he said. “I could ask you the same question.”

“It’s raining,” Drift admitted. “Thus the—” he waved at the crowd.

“Ah,” Ratchet said, and seemed to—stall there, blinking at Drift, after a cursory glance at the other new arrivals. “So, you’re here looking for—”

“Snacks,” Drift said hastily. He had to stop his hand from creeping up to his helm again. He turned and looked over at the bar; the lone employee, a flat bronze color with extendible arms, dourly set down the glass he was polishing. He had clearly been expecting a slow night, and was a little dismayed at the sudden rush. “So I’ll just—” Drift jerked his thumb in his direction. “Will you—save my seat?” He tried not to sound too hopeful, or look too pleased when Ratchet realized he was waiting for a response and nodded.

Most of the other newcomers didn’t seem to be in any hurry to put in an order, so he was back before long, carrying two plates piled with tasty-looking energon snacks, gelled cubes cut with crunchy silicates and spiced with something that turned them blue and green. Drift cleared a space with the back of his hand to set them in the middle of the table, plopped down on his stolen seat, and nudged both sets of treats toward Ratchet for good measure. “Have you tried these before? They’ve got barium and nickel.”

“I haven’t,” Ratchet said slowly. He plucked a cube from a dish and examined it as critically as he would a replacement t-cog. “I’ve been—” he gestured at the array of glasses, with their residual sheen of iridescent engex.

“You’ve been missing out,” Drift said, and then, in case Ratchet wanted to talk about it: “Rough shift?”

Ratchet scoffed, a rough scrape of his vocalizer. “Shift. Quartex. Vorn.”

Drift might not know a lot about Ratchet, but knew what that was like. “Well, I can’t promise these will fix anything, but they’re good. Squishy centers.”

Ratchet’s optics narrowed as he gave the cube in his hand a suspicious squeeze.

“You’re supposed to eat it,” Drift said helpfully, and gave Ratchet a cheeky smile when he looked up, unimpressed. He picked up his own small treat with both hands to savor in a series of tiny bites, shaving off a sliver at a time with sharp dentae. When he licked the silicate dust off his fingers and reached for another one, it was just in time to see Ratchet jerk his gaze back to his own cube, then pop the whole thing into his mouth.

After a few automatic chews, he froze. His optics brightened as they rose back toward Drift. “That’s _good_ ,” he said.

“You don’t have to sound so _surprised_ , wow—”

“No! I meant—” Ratchet shook his head, giving up, as Drift threw his head back and laughed. “Yes, fine. Maybe you’re right.” His optics glowed, probably because he’d had enough engex to overcharge a triple-changer, but he took another little cube when Drift held it out for him. “I’ve been missing out,” he said quietly.


	4. our choices seal our fate

Way back when Drift lived up closer to the surface, there was a racetrack he used to go to, far outside the city. He and his friends would drive the whole way out there, revving their engines on the empty roads before the sun came up and nudging ahead of each other, taking the corners too fast as they left the elevated highway and wound around the sharp foothills of the Manganese Mountains. The place they liked best had a few different courses, flat ones and steep ones, looped or twisting. One in particular, he’d loved: it started above ground, set a few jumps, took a few turns, then plunged down below the surface, into the side of a mountain, through a huge natural cavern and a treacherous knot of tunnels, floors barely smoothed enough for driving. The air was cold enough to shock your vents. Gritty dust made tires skip. All the sounds got swallowed up and reflected back in broken echoes off the dark bends. It was tricky to run, dangerous, and not just for the huge jump in the middle, the teetering ramp into nothingness that you had to take full speed if you were going to take it at all, flinging yourself into the void, flipping to root mode and back if you dared, trusting your reflexes to get you through the landing.

Sometimes Drift had weird jumbles of old memories float to the surface during recharge, and he woke up with a feeling like being lost in those tunnels, like if he could just find the right path, he could round a corner, spin his wheels, and burst out into the sunlight. Or maybe like he’d stumbled before the big jump, and he was still falling, without enough momentum to get across the chasm, hurtling down toward the unforgiving heart of the world.

He didn’t flinch as Ratchet’s wrist caught on the edge of his peeled-open plating, chasing a ruptured line behind his fuel pump. He traced that track through the mountain in his mind, each swooping hairpin though the sting of gravel. The pain dampeners he’d been given worked well enough, but his self-diagnostics were tripping over each other, scanning and re-scanning before the last one finished, routines hiccupping on floods of screaming errors as important pieces failed to report, and it was all he could do to keep himself still.

Most of the shards of drainpipe were out, at least, he thought. If there was still acid eating away at his internals, he could no longer tell.

Drift mentally ran the track another four times, losing his place and picking it up again as Ratchet dug around his internals and stitched them back together. The rest of the guys who’d brought him in were gone, kicked out so Ratchet could lock up; Drift had taken the brunt of the explosion, he’d gathered, and Ratchet had patched him well enough to live through everyone else’s surgeries before starting the biggest job. Someone was going to have to make sure the pipe was fixed up, too, before the next time it rained, or the whole block would flood. It was hard to think about the logistics, or the rest of the fallout from the raid; he went back to the track.

Drift wasn’t going to try to boot up his optics, but he could tell when Ratchet’s hands finally slowed, and when he stood back, leaving Drift’s plating the slightest bit colder. He heard the sound of the solvent rinse as Ratchet started washing up, and his deep, shaky vents as he stood at the basin afterward, unmoving.

He was really starting to worry, when Ratchet’s comm went off.

“Prima’s rusty _skidplate_ ,” Ratchet swore.

There was a pause from the other end of the line. “Hello to you too,” a voice said, crackling with interference; the call must have been routed from the upper layers.

“Pharma,” Ratchet said wearily. “Tell me nobody’s dying.”

“I think it would be more accurate to say that we all are. But, perhaps that’s more of a philosophical debate.” At this point, Drift had spent enough time around Ratchet that he could tell Ratchet had put a hand over his face by the sound of the impact alone. “I can see you’re not in the mood for droll discourse,” Pharma noted, so—whoever he was, he was at least _that_ observant. His voice took on an edge. “However, I was hoping that you _might_ be in the mood to actually come to work today.”

Ratchet’s hand slid down his face. Drift was starting to get a bad feeling about the whole conversation. He knew that Ratchet was a real doctor, somewhere else, somewhere topside, but—

“Are you even in _Iacon?_ ”

“Why,” Ratchet said, “so every time Nova’s _paint_ gets scuffed, I can—”

“You have a meeting in _half a joor_ with—”

“Senator Decimus can jump off a satellite, for all I care,” Ratchet said viciously.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, because I don’t think your ennui is worth your _face_ ,” Pharma snapped.

Ratchet took a few more strained vents. “That’s an exaggeration,” he said, but didn’t clarify—which part.

Of course, there’d be a downside to working for the Senate directly. Fuel, influence, a life in the sunlight—but if you crossed an overseer in the Dead End, the worst they could do was kill you, and they probably wouldn’t bother. That was what Enforcers were for—explosives in a drainpipe. You had to warrant special attention to be worth the resources to empurata. Drift had a chilling suspicion that clinic would be excuse enough.

Drift tried to click his vocalizer on, to tell him to go.

Ratchet was next to the table in an instant. “You’ll have to take the meeting,” he told Pharma. “I need to stay here.” His hand was warm even after the solvent, checking Drift’s stitches, his circulation, his EM readings.

“Ratchet!”

“I’ll owe you.”

“You _already_ owe me—”

“ _Pharma_ ,” he said, and only that. Drift wished he could see his face. He sounded upset. His hand came to rest over Drift’s aching spark, checking its energy or rotation, maybe, or just holding him down.

Pharma sighed. “Don’t make me regret this,” he said, and the call cut off.

For a few klicks, the room was quiet. Drift’s engine struggled, low on everything; he felt like he was held together with welds and glue. It took a few more tries for his vocalizer to click on.

“Settle down,” Ratchet said. His hand didn’t move, but it seemed to tighten against Drift’s plating. “I don’t know why your dampeners always wear off so fast, but you stay on that slab, kid, or I’ll magnetize you to it.”

“’M good,” Drift croaked.

“You’re half scrap. Including your brain module, clearly.”

He had to override a lot of errors to online his optics, and more to pick up his arm enough to rest a hand beside Ratchet’s on his chest, gently nudging the edges of their fingers together. “Y’should go,” he said. “Don’t get in trouble.”

He felt the little tremor that went through Ratchet’s hand before it pulled away. “You heard all that, huh?”

Ratchet was turning away, and Drift couldn’t stop him, or catch his hand. A noise of protest escaped, and Ratchet turned back long enough to point at him. “Don’t move.”

Drift let his head drop back against the berth. A little while later, Ratchet was back, offering a cup of fuel and coolant sludgy with nanites to boost his self-repair. “Drink,” he commanded, but he softened enough to help Drift keep his head up, standing close enough for him to see his worry. Drift didn’t try to reach for him again.

When he reset his vocalizer, it was working better. “I don’t want you to get shut down,” he said. “You got me back in one piece, Ratchet. I’ll be okay from here.”

Ratchet dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “Pharma is better at the political slag than I am anyway.” He was still looking at Drift with his face creased with worry. Drift frowned back with his own question. Ratchet’s gaze slid away, and he picked up the half-emptied cup next to the berth to stare into like he wished it was engex. “You’ve got some new plating,” he said, and winced.

Now Drift was very confused. “Yes? The—” he absently touched the dark grey durasteel that had been layered over some of his old white finish—since the last time he’d stopped by the clinic.

“It’s. Integrating well.” He’d heard Ratchet sound less awkward telling someone they had eight different viruses from interfacing unsafely. Actually, he’d seemed to enjoy that.

“Good? It’s, um. Heavier. Denser,” Drift said. “I found a guy—a team, I guess. They do. Armor.”

The corners of Ratchet’s mouth pinched as he swirled the cup of nutrient sludge and didn’t look up. “The mechs you came in with. Who brought you in.”

“No, not—oh, wait, you mean. Yeah, we all—them too.”

Ratchet scowled. “That plating may have saved your life. Your friends may have saved your life, by dragging you back here. But, I—I want to make sure—” He grimaced up at the ceiling.

“I know what I’m doing,” Drift said quietly.

Ratchet finally looked at him, face creased with unhappiness. He put down the cup. “What I pulled out of you. That shrapnel from the drainpipe.”

It figured that Ratchet would be able to tell. “There was bomb,” he said.

“Tell me _you_ didn’t—”

“ _We_ didn’t.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Ratchet said.

Drift laughed, short and harsh. His new welds protested. “Maybe,” he said, because he couldn’t deny it. If the explosive had been a little stronger, if the drainpipe it was hidden in had been full of acrid runoff instead of almost dry, if the energon shipment had been set off as was obviously intended, if the Enforcers had stuck around to shoot at them afterward—maybe.

Ratchet’s shoulders slumped in bleak silence. He stared down at his hands with his fingers spread, the forged medic’s hands he was gifted at sparking, smooth and immaculate, fine tools tucked away and delicate sensors humming, the hands that all but guaranteed he would always have a place in the shining world above.

Drift reached out with his own hand, plain and dented, paint worn dull. His fingertips made gentle contact with Ratchet’s palm. He waited for Ratchet to look up at him, mouth twisted with emotion. Drift said, “I hope not.”

After a moment of hesitation, and another, Ratchet’s hands closed warm around his.

In that long, hanging freefall, despite all the aches in his body, Drift’s spark felt light.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to leave this canon-compliant, but I also in my heart of hearts love the idea of Ratchet joining the Decepticons, too. 
> 
> Comments and kudos very much appreciated! I'm decepticon-propaganda on tumblr, if you want to leave a prompt or say hello :)


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